Manufacturers of compressible insulation materials, such as fiberglass insulation, have developed methods for compressing the insulation material in order to reduce transportation costs from the manufacturing site to the housing construction job site. The insulation batts are packaged into an insulation package, such as a bag of batts. Each bag contains a number of insulation batts, with the number depending on the thickness of the insulation batts. Several bags of insulation are compressed into a unit surrounded by a sleeve of plastic material. This unitizing of the bags into a single unit enables further compression of the batts for freight savings, and facilitates the handling of several bags at once. Not only are freight savings realized, but storage efficiencies by the customer are also realized because of the high level of compression of the insulation batts and the ability to stack units on top of each other.
In a desire to provide even greater freight and storage savings, it has been proposed to combine one or more units into a larger shipping package. While the shipping package of several units provides freight and storage advantages, it is not easily handled without mechanical equipment, i.e., it is difficult for the insulation contractor to move the shipping package by hand. It has been found that the shipping package must have a relatively square face in order for it to be manually turned end over end or "cartwheeled" from one location to another. It has been found that if the major face of the shipping package is rectangular with one of the edge dimensions substantially larger than the other edge dimension, the package is not readily manually cartwheelable by an installer, and therefore does not meet the customer's fitness-for-use requirements.
Even when a shipping package is designed so that it is cartwheelable by making the major face substantially square, another problem faced by the insulation contractor is that once the shipping package is broken down into the individual units, the units themselves are not cartwheelable because they are typically a slice or fraction of the size of the shipping package, and therefore have generally elongated rectangular major faces.